One of the reasons Google is so interesting (apart from its upcoming IPO) is that the company has learned to harness the collective intelligence of vast numbers of people, says James Surwiecki, author of a new book called The Wisdom of Crowds.

"Under the right circumstances, groups are smarter, make better decisions and are better at solving problems than even the smartest people within them," writes Surwiecki in a recent issue of Forbes. "On any one problem a few people may outperform the group. But over time collective wisdom is near-impossible to beat. No one, you might say, knows more than everyone."

Some have called it community intelligence; still others refer to "swarm intelligence," "smart mobs" and "tipping points." What's interesting is the drift toward potential innovations that draw on the unspoken and unanticipated knowledge of today's (and tomorrow's) customers. Surwiecki suggests problem solving approaches that leverage collective intelligence may turn out to be the best way to determine whether demand truly exists for new products and services.

Surwiecki explains that Google "has succeeded for a simple reason: It regularly finds the Web pages that are most valuable and puts them at the top of the list. The heart of the technology that lets it do this is the PageRank algorithm (after cofounder Larry E. Page), which essentially asks Web page producers to vote on which other pages are most worthwhile. Each link to a page counts as a vote. Google is a republic, rather than a pure democracy; sites that have more links into them are effectively given more voting power. But the principle is fundamentally democratic -- let the masses decide."